


what could not be given or taken away.

by foundCarcosa



Category: Fable (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 12:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/661895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate-universe imagining of Sparrow's future with the Hero of Will.<br/>[ content warning: miscarriage ]</p>
            </blockquote>





	what could not be given or taken away.

She tells him around the time she would have had her moon's blood, if it hadn't been absent for two moons prior.

"Hope you know I'm not carrying any of that in," she says smugly, indicating the firewood piling up next to the chopping block, and parks herself on the stoop of the farmhouse with an apple and a grin. Garth lets the axe fall to his side and glares.

"You have _got_ to be kidding me."

"Don't be rude. I have to take extra care of myself now. By the way, what do you think about the name 'Logan'?"

It takes him a moment, but Garth's visible eye widens. "You're...?"

"In a family way? Got a bun in the oven? Sitting my big rump on a golden egg?" Sparrow laughs, polishing the apple on her trousers before taking a bite. Garth is shocked enough to drop the axe on his foot, and Sparrow's renewed laughter is surely loud enough to be heard _outside_ the haven that is Serenity Farm.

Up by the windmill, he experiments with carpentry. A crib emerges within a couple of weeks.  
"I like this new domestic Garth," she comments, goosing him with an elbow as he wipes his streaming brow, and he scowls self-consciously.

She loosens the seams of her tunics soon enough, refusing to shell out for new ones. Her hand permanently relocates to the small of her back when she walks. He finds himself magnetised to the swell of her abdomen, the life coiled within.  
He sometimes wakes up in a cold sweat, remembering a time long past when he'd cradled children in his arms only to watch them burn later.  
"Not this time," she whispers drowsily, "not this time."

It is six months past when the wail comes, shattering the peace of a soft morning. Garth drops the weeds he'd been snatching from the garden plots and bolts towards the farmhouse, but he can do nothing once he's reached her, nothing but stare in sick dismay.

He'd warned her that the Spire's energy may cause complications.  
He'd meant nightmares, brain disorders, early-onset dementia.

"Look what he took from me!" she sobs, on her knees, her thighs slick with crimson and her hands shaking as she snatches at the bloodied mess on the floor. She cannot make the clots and clumps form a shape again, cannot pull them back into her body, cannot wish them into the child she'd dreamt of. _"Look what he took from me!"_

Haunted and hollow-eyed, she doesn't sleep for days, but neither does Garth. They avoid the bed, becoming shadowy shapes in the garden late at night, her eyes pleading with him to explain, to reassure, to fix it, his eyes downcast because he knows he cannot.  
"Not this time," she murmurs brokenly, returning from waking fever-dreams where she can hear the child crying but cannot reach him, and Garth presses his lips to her damp forehead.

The orphanage opens in Bowerstone. Sparrow, older now, and crowned, squeezes Garth's hand until his circulation fails. But she goes in with him.

They raise two, a prince and a princess.  
"Look what he couldn't take from you," Garth says with the pride of a husband and a father, when he yields a black-haired infant to her trembling arms.


End file.
